Word: gingrich
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Playboy-Prodded. Esquire has seen several downs and ups. When it was born in 1933, the outgrowth of a men's-wear trade magazine, Editor Arnold Gingrich sought literary quality to complement his fashion features-and got it at $100 a story from Depression-pressed authors like F. Scott Fitzgerald, e. e. cummings, Dashiell Hammett, Ezra Pound, Thomas Wolfe and Thomas Mann. One exception: Ernest Hemingway, who characteristically demanded and got $200. Much of Esquire's fiction has remained on that level, with postwar bylines including Joyce Gary, William Faulkner, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Miller, Paddy Chayefsky, Sinclair Lewis...
During World War II, the monthly pared its literary content, beefed up its G.I. appeal with pulpy westerns and mysteries and a parade of cheesecake by Illustrators Varga and George Petty. Following the war, Gingrich and Owner David Smart disagreed over the magazine's direction and Gingrich left. "It became a sort of uptown Argosy," says Gingrich. By the time he returned in 1952, "the original advertisers had left, ad revenues were down, and the whole climate was such that those associated with its early phase refused to touch it with a ten-foot pole." Gingrich set it back...
Organized Anarchy. Nonetheless, Esquire did not do away with its gatefold pinup until January 1957. The magazine was still struggling. But by then, Gingrich had hired Editors Harold Hayes, Ralph Ginzburg, Clay Felker and Rust Hills to give the magazine a fresh and somewhat corrosive tone...
Hayes, a soft-spoken North Carolinian who started his career as an assistant editor for Pageant magazine, remained. He rose to managing editor in 1962, editor in 1963. He pacified the staff, tackled a perennial dull-cover problem by persuading Gingrich to try out George Lois, one of the adman inventors of the Volkswagen campaign. Lois, in real life a partner in the advertising firm of Papert, Koenig, Lois, Inc., gives away the $600 he gets for each cover to a Greek charity. Hayes also put across the idea that the magazine's editors should think up the table...
Other contributors to the Saturday Review discussion include Arnold Gingrich, publisher of Esquire, and Irwin Karp, legal representative for the Authors' League of America...